Natural Zones4-channel silent video, 3D model, C-prints, 2014

A landscape is not a pre-existing thing in itself. Rather, it is made into a landscape, into a humanly meaningful space, by the living which takes place within it. Natural Zones is an ongoing project which investigates the representative function of landscape as a space of confinement. It explores the Constru-ction Project 501–503, one of the most striking examples of the utopian projects of Stalin’s era: a 1,200 km-long railway in the Arctic zone of Western Siberia. It was never finished. The construction was frozen and abandoned after Stalin’s death in 1953. These distant places were regarded as a prison without bars due to the inaccessibility of the territory and the severity of the climate. The surrounding landscape of the endless tundra bears within itself a constraining power. The horizon becomes not only the limit of the visible, beyond which space continues, but also an insurmountable boundary.